Ben Wilson (Jonathan Cape)
THE Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed by about 190 countries last year, pledges to reform environmental subsidies, ensure large businesses declare their effect on biodiversity and conserve 30 per cent of the planet – all by 2030. But the document doesn’t mention cities.
In Urban Jungle: Wilding the city, historian Ben Wilson shows just what an omission this is. He describes how “real nature” was once thought to exist only in countryside, reserves, mountains and forests. But look closely at the urban environment, he writes, and see how it teems with wildlife.
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This explains many strange facts and figures, Wilson says: why New York contains more species than Yosemite National Park in California; why urban gardens support more species than semi-wild rural habitats of an equivalent size; and why Australian cities shelter more endangered species per square kilometre than non-urban areas. Urban areas are just “stunningly biodiverse”, says Wilson, “often far more so than nearby countryside”.
Generations of ecologists saw suburbia as a “degraded, profoundly unnatural, messed up place”, he says, but the complex tessellation of different open spaces on the expanding border between city and country has created “hybrid habitats where the artificial mixes with the natural”. The UK and Ireland, for example, boast 1625 native plant species, but there are 55,000 species on sale for domestic gardeners and 70 per cent of plants in a typical garden are non-native. This makes an “alluring habitat for an impressive and increasing array of animals, birds and insects, many of them endangered by intensive farming and climate change”.
Wilson acknowledges that urbanisation is “a shocking, destructive event for native wildlife”, but thinks it is too late to stop it. “This kind of habitat is a reality, ” he argues, “and it is irreversible. Better to embrace it than wish it away. Right in front of our noses is a lavish, vital ecosystem that needs to be valued if it is to thrive.”
Urban Jungle is divided into sections covering parks, water, trees and so on, tracing how cities incorporated and transformed the wild, from the marshes of southern Mesopotamia in the 5th millennium BC to 21st-century Amsterdam’s ambition to become a circular city – based on the reuse and regeneration of materials.
We hear how the modern suburban garden began with officials returning from British imperial outposts, who modelled their houses on the green cities where they had lived abroad. Also, we discover how advances in siege gunnery created the boulevard, as defensive earthworks were planted with Italian-style double rows of trees – the start of a long arboreal invasion that has left cities like London and New York with twice the tree cover a rural area would need to be defined as a forest by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
The separation of the modern city from nature, writes Wilson, is a recent phenomenon, driven by the hubris and pollution of the industrial revolution. This must be reversed if we are to survive the Anthropocene’s challenges. He paints a future of patchwork urban expansion, concentrated in “dense, moderately sized hubs set amid substantial patches of remnant vegetation” and “a matrix of habitat highways cutting across the concrete and asphalt desert” so animals can flourish.
He looks forward to parks that prioritise biodiversity as “acts of redemption”, and to “zero-acre” agriculture projects in abandoned warehouses that build resilience and reduce the environmental cost of growing food. He imagines a city that is no longer a greedy input-output machine, but a functioning ecosystem “deserving of our protection and nurture”.
By splitting his book into sections, Wilson loses the thrust of a linear history, and he doesn’t really explain the thinking behind his relaxed attitude to ecological change. But as the world’s urban landscape increases by the size of Manhattan Island every day, we urgently need to work out how cities can live in harmony with nature before nature hits back.
Richard Lea is a writer based in London and editor of Fictionable
